


One Regret (And It's You)

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Gotham (TV)
Genre: Alternate Origin Story, Angst, M/M, Pre-Slash, Suicidal Ideation, i can't decide whether you should live or die: the ship, the many kidnappings of Bruce Wayne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-09 16:51:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11108772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: it's a bad comedy for an empty theater, but still, the play goes onBruce and Jerome hurtle towards their inevitable futures





	One Regret (And It's You)

**Author's Note:**

> you better believe I made a [playlist](https://8tracks.com/desdemonakaylose/one-regret-and-it-s-you)

Someday, when this rooftop has collapsed into rubble under the strain of one very bad day, Bruce will climb the rubble one skittering crumb of concrete at a time, clutching the broken latch of his shoulder armor. In the red-tinted darkness, against the whine of distant fire trucks, he will scale the wreckage one heavy breath at a time until he at last comes to rest against the peak, and he will wait. He will wait for half an hour, bleeding sluggishly, for the Joker to arrive.

But that’s a long way away.

 

 

___

In the gray afternoon Bruce tucked his tongue between his teeth as he attached a line to the bars of a balcony on Pearl Street. The building, once an apartment complex, had been closed earlier in the decade after asbestos was found in the ceilings, and then never successfully demolished. The bottom floors were occupied by the legion of Gotham’s street children, one of whom Bruce had once been for a very short time. He tugged the line, to make sure the knot was firmly in place, and then ducked down to his duffle bag. When he came up again, ejector in hand, he found the railing of the balcony occupied by Jerome Valeska.

Bruce swore, recoiled and tumbled over the forgotten duffle bag, the ejector gun skittering out of his hand. Jerome whooped with laughter, kicking his heels against the balcony bars.

“Do it again!” he crowed, tipping so far back that only a gravitational abnormality could explain why he didn’t fall.

Bruce drew back into a crouch, his heart almost vibrating in his chest. “What do _you_ want?” he said.

Jerome showed his teeth. They had the jagged look of too many things pushed into a too-small space, but his smile was so wide, so unnervingly wide—it gave the awful impression that Jerome Valeska had more teeth than a normal human skull should ever hold. Bruce knew, intellectually, that it was only teeth- and yet his reptile brain couldn’t help but shy away. His reptile brain remembered sharks.

“Are you here to try and kill me again?”

Jerome’s smile turned sharp and warning. “Try?” he echoed.

Bruce held his ground. The grey sky above them bloomed dark spots, threatening rain.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Jerome said, at last, and relaxed like a sunbather under the dark sky. He was wearing a long green coat, ratty and oversized, with fingerless gloves now too grubby to make out their original color. He looked like a Fagan, a derelict homeless king.

“Where’s your army of sycophants?” Bruce asked, trying to peer surreptitiously over the edge to the street below.

“What,” Jerome said, “you think I know where they are all the time? You think they all sleep on my living room floor like puppies?”

Bruce frowned. “I’ve studied cults,” he said. “Physical isolation—”

“You’ve studied _cults_!” Jerome mocked. “Baby boy thinks he just knows everything about everything, don’t he?”

“It doesn’t work if you let them live with their families,” Bruce pressed on, bristling despite himself. “They have to reinforce their own group behavior.”

“You know what’s really interesting about killers?” Jerome said. He swung his legs absently, squinting up at the sky. “They’re all just… planted around, scattered—” he made a motion like opening a handful of dust into the wind, “—in the masses. How many years did every serial killer live unnoticed in his cute little suburban house, in his cute little suburban neighborhood? Every old lady who put rat poison in her hubby’s jack and coke?  Do you think bad people wear name tags, Brucie?”

“ _You_ do,” Bruce pointed out.

Jerome looked down at the breast of his jacket, where the faded ink read “Hi, My Name is Gordy”. “Mm,” he hummed. “Memo to self, peel stickers off stolen property.”

Bruce wondered who he’d stolen the jacket from, and why they had needed a name tag for something so ragged. It irritated him that he wasn’t able to come up with a satisfactory answer.  There were so many things happening at Gotham at any given time, and he knew so little about _any_ of them. He was quickly coming to the conclusion that living on Wayne manor was about as useful for his continuing education as living on the moon. He needed to get back into the city, but without Selena around to guide him—

“What’s the doohickey?” Jerome asked.

“Grappling gun,” Bruce answered, before he could think better of it. He winced, but it was too late, Jerome’s eyes had already lit up.

“Little prince, little prince,” Jerome sang, “what’re you up to with a thing like that?”

“That’s none of your business,” Bruce said. His shoe scraped the concrete as he slid back, hand feeling blindly at the ground, but it was too little too late—Jerome saw him reaching and dove off the railing like an animal, bounding off his hands and knocking Bruce out of the way in his urgency. Bruce pulled himself back up on his knees and tackled Jerome, their hands scrabbling at each other, elbows in each other’s jaws, until finally Jerome gave a wild heave and rolled Bruce to the ground. One hand tight against Bruce’s chest, he used his own head to jam against the flat of the hook until it clicked into place, slotted and ready to fire.

He leveled the muzzle with Bruce’s throat.

“That was rude of you,” he said, licking blood from his split lips. The skin there was so dry it looked pale, ghostly, around the split seam. “Let’s try this again.”

“If you fire that you’ll break my jaw, but you won’t kill me.”

Jerome tipped his head. “Ya know,” he said, “for most folks that would be scary enough.”

Bruce only glared at him.

“Boy,” Jerome said, “you are just not! talkative!”

When Bruce still said nothing, Jerome gave a huge sigh and rolled off of him. He dropped the gun absently, making his way back to the railing of the balcony. Bruce, not so stuck on pride that he’d deliberately handicap himself, immediately scrambled for the gun and aimed it at Jerome’s back.

“Honestly? I keep thinking about killing you,” Jerome said, propping a hand on his hip. “But you got to me, you know? It’s gotta be big. It’s gotta be right. I coulda done it so easy a _dozen_ times this week, and I just can’t. I’m hooked.”

The scars around the edges of his face made him look perpetually masked. He reminded Bruce simultaneously of comedy and drama faces, his mouth bizarrely widened by the thin outline of a scar. When he turned, glancing over his shoulder, he rolled his eyes at Bruce’s grappling gun.

“You gonna shoot that or wave it around some more?” he said, lifting an eyebrow.

Bruce’s fingers sweated. He looked down at the thing in his hands—it hadn’t felt like a real gun until he pointed at someone, but now it was hot in his hands, hot and radiating a nausea that had nothing to do with his stomach. He thought about pearls on the concrete.

Exhausted all at once, he dropped his arms.

“Didn’t think so,” Jerome said. “For a guy who can take so many staples to the arm, you don’t have much of a spine.” A thought seemed to occur to him, as he suddenly settled back against the rail and fixed Bruce with an interested look. “Hey,” he said, “I tell ya what. If you’ve got the balls, you can kill me right now. I bet you know how, with that cute little toy gun of yours. Orrrrr you could push me.”

“Kill you,” Bruce said.

“Sure,” Jerome said. “I don’t think you’ll do it, but I’m kinda curious. Come on, free shot.”

“Unprovoked,” Bruce said, “in cold blood, against an unarmed man?”

“...Mmmm no,” Jerome said, rolling his neck. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“You think you have to be brave to kill someone?” Bruce said, brows furrowing.

“I saw you in that mirror maze,” Jerome said. “You had me, Brucie-boy, but you chickened out. You couldn’t take the shot.”

“That’s not being _brave_ ,” Bruce said, “people kill each other every day for terrible reasons! It’s common and horrible! It’s not _brave_ to kill someone!”

“People are afraid of consequences,” Jerome replied. “If you want someone dead and you have the chance, you’re either afraid, or you’re brave enough not to be.”

“How is stabbing someone who can’t fight back any kind of bravery? How is it brave to kill someone in their own kitchen? That’s _cowardice_.”

Jerome gave him a cold smile. “I don’t think you’ve been in the right kitchens, Brucie.”

“Maybe not,” Bruce said. “Or maybe you’ve been in the wrong ones.”

Jerome snapped his eyes shut and held up a finger, and then he took a deep breath. “You are just,” he said, “ _insufferable_. I’m leaving before you convince me to kill you early.”

And he shoved his hands in his pockets and stalked back out through the apartment, into the hallway, and was lost in the light beyond. For a long time Bruce stood there waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then when the sky opened up above him and still nothing had happened, he slumped into the wall and allowed himself to breathe.

 

 

 

The GCPD precinct in the narrows was not, by general agreement, nearly as modern and liberal as the one which Jim Gordon had been in and out of for years. Bruce was coming to that conclusion himself, as he watched the police carelessly wrapping up a possible homicide scene. They had left the chalk outline on the concrete for the locals to wash away on their own time, not to mention the blood. Bruce knew better than to correct an officer on the street at this point—that had not gone over well at _all_ in the past, and the arrest on his record irked him deeply—but watching their slapdash efforts made his blood pressure spike something terrible. He was teaching himself a lot about forensics lately, and the almost deliberate corruption of the scene was just—he could just—

Beside him, someone whistled softly. He turned and found Jerome, leaning up against the cordon, red hair hidden under the kind of old fashioned hat that Detective Bullock favored. He winked at Bruce, whose blood flashed cold under his skin.

“You,” he said.

“Me,” Jerome agreed.

“You have the—” Bruce bit his cheek. He couldn’t afford to lose his temper now. “After people you hurt? Fifty in the hospital? That gas leak could have killed all of them!”

“Well it was _supposed_ to?” Jerome said, with a derisive little flick of his head.  “Honestly, kind of a let down. Not one fatality.”

He seemed even more eerily pale and hauntingly dark under the eyes, even in the sunshine which should have warmed him. He was like something out of a ghost story, with his white lips splitting bloody red over his too-wide smile.

“You can’t be here,” Bruce snarled.

“What’re you gonna do?” Jerome said, clapping a hand to his cheek. “We both know you don’t have the guts to kill me.”

Bruce tightened his fist. “I’ll call the police over,” he said. “Even in the narrows, they all hate you.”

Jerome huffed. “You’re so boooring,” he said.

“Officer!” Bruce shouted, “Officer!”

“Jiminy Christmas, it’ll be a relief when you’re dead.”

The officer ignored Bruce’s shouting and jumping, fiddling with his Ziploc of evidence even as Jerome skipped off into the crowd and was entirely lost. Bruce gave up his effort, finally slumping over the cordon and panting, furious, until the officer finally wandered over his way.

“You need something kid?” the officer asked, puffing absently on a cigar.

“Forget it,” Bruce said. “I don’t know why I thought a police officer would be helpful, anyway.”

 

 

 

“Oh, and by the way!”

The television flickered black and carousel pastels, and Jerome’s permanently etched face blinked back into focus. He licked his lips, starting to bleed even under the cake makeup.

“I’ve decided you’re right,” he said. He took the camera in his hands, the muscles of his thumbs twitching as if he were petting the sides of the lenses. “There’s nothing brave about killing. Killing is the most natural thing in the world. Nothing more natural than one chimp bashing in another one’s head!”

On his couch in the manor’s primary den, Bruce gave a start. That was their old conversation. That was almost certainly meant for him. He turned the already-loud volume up.

“Violence is the language we use to show people their place!” Jerome said, peering uncomfortably deep into the camera. “Violence is the language of order! And what better way to show the world the face of anarchy than to speak the lingua franca!”

He pulled back, the spinning lights behind him visible again, as he wiggled his fingers at the audience.

“I’ll be seeing you, baby boy.”

 

 

 

Bruce was at class in the city, walking out of the Krav Maga studio with his towel around his neck when they got him. The thing they pulled over his face smelled like cheap plastic, and it let a little light in just at the corner of his eye—a Halloween mask, he thought. That was his first thought. His second thought, as they bundled him off into some kind of van, was how ironic it was to be kidnapped outside a martial arts studio. Clearly he hadn’t been learning fast enough.

At the end of the long ride, in which his heart slowly came back down to something resembling a resting rate, they dumped him on a smooth concrete floor, dusty under his fingers. He counted at least six hands, he thought, but when the mask was snatched off his head, it was only him and Jerome.

It had been maybe an office building at one point, but now all that remained were support columns and clouded windows far across the floor, puddles of water reflecting thick yellow light back up at the piecemeal sky. A few feet away there was an old elegant arm chair someone had dragged in, framed between two pillars like a throne. As Jerome tossed the mask aside he sauntered back to it, kicking his legs up over the armrest. The paper crown around his head hung at an angle.

“Welcome to the court,” he said, tucking his hands behind his neck.

Bruce carefully climbed to his feet. This was not the weirdest thing that had happened to him since his parents’ death. Honestly he was expecting more; with Jerome there always seemed to be more. There was a gothic over-enthusiasm to him, detail layered on detail, crammed set pieces with loud conflicting sensory input. This was oddly silent.

“This is where you want to kill me?” Bruce said, looking up at the featureless grey ceiling. “Here?”

Jerome shot him a narrow look. “No,” he said, “this is just a layover. I’ll kill you when I want to.”

“So then,” Bruce says, sitting back on his knees, “what do you want now, if it’s not that?”

Jerome’s expression soured. He kicked at the open laces of one boot with the other. “Don’t you want to try some bargaining? How about one of those clumsy little manipulative speeches?”

“Do _you_ want me to?”

Jerome leapt to his feet, stalking the floor to grab Bruce by the ear and haul him upright. Bruce gritted his teeth and followed the grip as Jerome dragged him back to the old chair and threw him into it. When Bruce tried to disentangle himself from the plush leather, Jerome whipped out a gun and aimed it at him. “Stay,” he said.

Bruce grudgingly obliged.

“What is it about you?” Jerome said, eyes flickering, seemly distracted by sounds and signs outside of Bruce’s perception.

“About me?”

Jerome’s attention snapped back to him. “ _You_ ,” Jerome said. “Little prince, little orphan lord—two orphans walk into a police investigation, the first orphan says, someone killed my parents, I’m here to file a police report—so the officer turns to the second orphan and says, what about you kid, you need help too? And the second orphan says—I don’t need anybody’s handouts, I’m a self made orphan!”

Bruce watched him as he began to pace, tapping the side of the gun to his temple like it was a tick, his loose laces bouncing against his ankles. On a second look he seemed ragged, dark-circled and antsy, dressed in jeans and a shirt with the logo of some obscure punk band across the back. Nothing like his usual meticulous disguises and dramatic costumes.

“What’s it like in that big empty house of yours?” Jerome asked. “I bet it’s quiet.”

 “Are you threatening me?”

Jerome paused in his step for a moment. “Am I?” he said.

“Are you?”

For a moment they stared at each other. The safety was on, Bruce could make out now, even as Jerome waved it around. He could make a break for it and probably get to an exit before Jerome realized why his gun wasn’t firing. That was careless of him, a different kind of careless from his usual suicidal disregard for safety catches altogether.

“Oooh, Brucie,” Jerome said, low in his throat, “what is it about you? I have so many plans, and I keep coming back to _you_.”

Bruce was trying to calculate the distance to the nearest exit, but Jerome didn’t seem to notice or care.

“When I kill you I know it’ll stop,” he said, “it has to stop, it’s just that I haven’t done it yet—it’s unfinished business, like a _shave and a haircut_ but no one ever does the _two bits_ , like when you’ve got a song stuck in your head and you can’t get past that one line, it just loops and loops and loops _,_ and _it doesn’t stop—_ ”

Something about the steadily rising pitch, the faster and faster syllables, made Bruce pause. He gave Jerome a third hard look. He looked terrible, even beyond his physical half-kempt strangeness. Fidgety and wild-eyed, off balance even as he traced the same path across the floor again and again.

“Are you sure it’s me that’s the problem?” Bruce asked.

Jerome whirled. “What else could it possibly be?” he snapped.

Bruce considered the hands from earlier, the van, the general vague sense that this plot was hatched and executed without much foresight or planning. “Maybe it’s hard being a leader?” Bruce said. “Harder than you thought it would be?”

Jerome snorted. “No real job is easy,” he said.

“Okay…” Bruce said. “So maybe that’s not the problem. Maybe the problem is you’re doing it alone?”

“I’m not _alone_ ,” Jerome said. “I can have people in here with a snap of my fingers!”

Bruce sat forward. Warmer. He could feel himself getting warmer. “You’re still alone though, aren’t you?” he said. “You don’t have any friends in Gotham, do you? I bet you don’t even have a real second in command. You’ve always been alone, but now you’re alone and you aren’t by yourself anymore, and that’s too much even for someone like you.”

“Are you calling me _lonely?”_ Jerome growled.

“I don’t know,” Bruce answered honestly. “I wouldn’t think you had it in you.”

Jerome lunged, gun forgotten in his hand as he wrapped it and both his hands around Bruce’s neck. He planted a knee in the leather at Bruce’s side, his heavy furious breath panting out between them. Bruce stared stone faced up into his red-rimmed eyes.

“Is a little bit of peace so much to ask for!” Jerome said, his grip tight enough to threaten but not tight enough to injure. “An hour of sleep! Silence! I haven’t really slept since those mother _fuckers_ brought me back from the dead!”

His head fell, and laughter bubbled out of his chapped lips, wet and hiccupping and ugly. “Peace,” he gasped. “Why can’t I have peace?”

Bruce frowned. Hesitantly, he pressed his palm to the older boy’s temple and tugged him back up. “Do you want to die?” he asked.

“There’s too much to do,” Jerome muttered, looking aside. “Too many plans—I have to show them—”

It was odd. For a moment, although Bruce never lost track of how he came to be here and what kind of position he was truly in, for a moment what he felt for Jerome wasn’t anger. With a hand against his wet face, Bruce felt a perfect, sad empathy. “It would be quieter, wouldn’t it,” he said. “If there wasn’t still so much left to do…”

Jerome met his eye. Almost certainly the redness there was from crying, and Bruce could imagine it now—frustrated and exhausted, locked away in this huge room far away from the legion who could never be allowed to know, unable to rest—

“I’ve got this theory,” Jerome said.

Bruce watched him. “Go on,” he said.

“The only thing separating me from the rest of the world,” he said, “is that I’ve already had the worst day of my life. Most people’s worst day is the day they die. Not me. If they could live it, like I did, they’d come out the other side too.”

“The other side of what?”

Jerome shrugged irritably. “Everything, I don’t know. Systems. Relationships. Meaning.”

Bruce thought about the carnival, the gas leak in the subway system, the matricide, the myriad other little crimes and sins. “You don’t think human life has meaning?”

Jerome laughed again, this time frenzied and cracking and dry. He let go of Bruce’s neck, slumping into his shoulder. “Meaning!” he said. “What could there be! Death is inevitable, pain is temporary! Every concept of a relationship is as artificial as the preservatives in your morning cocopuffs.”

“There’s a flaw in your theory,” Bruce observed. “I know I’ve lived the worst day of my life, and I still don’t agree with you.”

Against his ear, Jerome said, “You’ll come around, Brucie boy. You’ll come around.”

And then, after a moment, he sighed. “Scooch over,” he said. He pushed Bruce against the right arm rest and then swung himself up into the remaining space, hanging his legs over the side, his torso over Bruce’s lap. They both just fit into the old chair, with Jerome slumped over him, his eyes drifting uneasily closed. Bruce tried to figure out where to put his hands down, which had come up in a warding position somewhere in the commotion and now hovered awkwardly at his chest. Jerome peered up with one puffy eye.

“Jeeze lousie,” he said, and grabbed Bruce’s hands. One he set down on his own knee, where it hooked over the arm rest. The other he pulled under his own neck, like a pillow. “You’re the only person in the world I know wouldn’t kill me,” he mused, “right now, given half the chance.”

“That’s your own fault,” Bruce pointed out. “If you hadn’t committed so many horrible crimes—”

Jerome scoffed, but it was halfhearted. “Even before,” he mumbled.

The lines of scar tissue seemed a little paler than before—eventually, he was sure, they would fade to a pearlescent white almost indistinguishable from his chalk paleness. Valeska, Bruce mused, seemed entirely the wrong family of names for someone so clearly Irish, but maybe there was a story there too.

“I’ve wanted to kill you before,” Bruce said. “I’ll want to again.”

“The day you take my life,” Jerome said, “is the day you can have it, kid.”

With his eyes closed, the cartoonish outlines of his mutilated face looked more sad than frightening. The truth was, Bruce didn’t have many friends either. No one would call a boy who tried to kill him more than once a _friend_ , but still—in the fading afternoon, in the cavernous quiet of that gutted building—there was a closeness, a knowing, that Bruce had only shared with a precious few people in his life. Jerome rested his hand on top of Bruce’s, his fingers fever hot in the perpetual Gotham chill.

“Goodnight Brucie,” he said, “sleep tight. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”

But, with the arrival of police sirens and blaring bullhorns just before midnight, the morning never came. Bruce woke up alone in the night, surprised to find that he had fallen asleep, and cold. It didn’t occur to him until much later that Jerome had an awful lot to say about his future, for someone who planned to end it.

 

 

 

Jerome comes and goes for years after that. Bruce suspects he is the most kidnapped boy in America, with a permanent backstage pass to whatever strange hideaway Jerome has picked out for that month. He sees abandoned carnivals, hijacked theme parks, dark stage shows, broadcast sets—everything Jerome does, he does loud and big. Whatever else he is, he’s a showman.

In the dressing room of Gotham’s prima donna, Jerome fixes his bowtie with fussy little tugs. Cultists-cum-hench people rush by in the hallway beyond, the door cracked just enough to hear their laughter and nonsense chatter. Bruce is certain that now, regardless of what Jerome once said, some of them do live in whatever compound they occupy this week. The rest are more than happy to pick up and leave their families when the call comes through, but maybe a dozen faces Bruce seems to see every time. They know him too. Some of them almost baby him, coo at him and fix his clothing and wave to him through the rolled down windows of a stolen police van. Some of them seem to barely stop themselves from ripping out his throat at any given time. Bruce has wondered what’s stopping them, but lately he doesn’t wonder anymore.

“Peachy!” Jerome remarks to his reflection, pulling back.

They are putting on some butchered version of Pagliacci, if Bruce is any guess. Being a performer at the Gotham opera is probably the second most hazardous profession in the city. It seems like every year there’s some new plot to hijack the stage.

“That’s the best thing about clowns,” Jerome says, picking up the thread of some one-sided conversation that Bruce has long since lost track of. “No one really trusts them. And it’s not just because of horror novels! Nah, it’s worse than that. Deep down everyone knows they’re paid to laugh. Someone who’s happy even when they’re not? You can’t trust anything about them!”

He combs his fingers through Bruce’s hair, tucking pieces back into place that were loosened in the rush of the kidnapping. Today they dropped a net on him.

“The funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” Jerome murmurs, “was a crowd full of people laughing at a man who tried to kill his wife an hour earlier. They pried him off her with the lion trainer’s whip still around her neck. _La commedia è finita_ _!_ ”

“So… how do I die tonight?” Bruce asks. He never knows what to say to Jerome’s disturbing personal anecdotes.

“I thought stabbing would be very in theme,” Jerome answers. He presses two fingers to the side of Bruce’s neck, gloved and stiff. The pulse beneath his touch jumps.

“A regular stabbing?” Bruce says. “After you hijacked a whole opera?”

Jerome hisses and pulls back, rummaging without purpose through the dressing room of a singer who even now is tied up in the broom closet outside. He doesn’t seem to be searching for anything in particular. A bottle of champagne goes flying over his shoulder and cracks against the far wall.

“Is there a goal to all this tonight?” Bruce says, “Or are we just staging another attempted murder?”

“There doesn’t need to be a _goal_ ,” Jerome snaps.

“Then what’s the point?”

“There doesn’t need to be a _point_!”

Champagne fizzles and drips down the wall. “You know,” Bruce says, slowly, “I think the Riddler did this too.”

Jerome turns and slams his hands against the counter on either side of him. “Did _what?”_

“Lashed out,” Bruce says. “Tried to find an edge somewhere to ground himself on. Pointless violence. You’re doing it too, pushing for the sake of pushing because you don’t know where to stop.”

“I don’t _want_ to stop,” Jerome says, with a dangerous edge to his voice.

“You say you don’t,” agrees Bruce, who has been thinking about this for a while now.

“Why is it,” Jerome says, “that whatever I say, you _insist_ on saying the opposite?”

“Aren’t you tired of this?” Bruce asks him. “The lengths you have to go to just to have a conversation?”

“You think I do this to _talk to you?”_

“I don’t think you talk to anyone else,” Bruce says. “It stands to reason.”

“I,” Jerome snarls, “am trying to _kill_ you.”

“Okay,” Bruce says, tipping up his chin. “So do it.”

Jerome dips down and swipes the shattered champagne bottle from the floor. He bears down on Bruce, sticky fizz dripping from the sharp edges of his weapon. Bruce holds still. He’s taller now than he was when they first met, when he was fourteen and afraid and powerless to stop the boy who dragged him around a carnival towards his untimely death. He’s stronger too. He thinks they both know that if they fought now, hand to hand, Bruce would win.

He thinks they both know, on some level, that Bruce wouldn’t be here still if he wasn’t willing to be.

“You’re so _boring_ ,” Jerome says. “What is it about you—”

He thumps the glass against his side, anxiously, the red scarf around his tuxedo collar swishing with each tap.

“Sometimes I think,” he says, “if I killed you, you’d just come back worse. I think that you’re like me—there’s something much worse in you waiting to be cut free. Some people, heh, some people just _refuse_ to stay buried.”

“You know what I think?” Bruce says. “I don’t think it’s any of that. I think you’re afraid to kill me because you don’t want me to die. I think,“ he says, stepping forward, "I matter to you.”

“ _Nothing_ ,” Jerome spits, “ _matters_.”

“I think you’re afraid because you know you’re wrong,” Bruce pushes on, stepping closer still. “And you don’t know how to live in the world if you’re wrong about so much.”

“Shut up!” Jerome says. “Shut up right now or I’ll—”

“Kill me?” Bruce finishes. “And then you’ll be alone again, just like you were before. Don’t you think that’s sad? Don’t you think that’s tragic?” He closes the distance, grabs Jerome by the shoulders, ignores the broken bottle that hangs between them. “Jerome, let this _go_. There’s got to be another way. You can put away the gang, leave the city—have a real life somewhere, try again!”

“Artificial,” Jerome says. “Pathetic.”

“Then—” Bruce lets go of his shoulders and takes his face in both hands, overcome with an urgency that frightens him. “Come with me! I’m leaving for Europe in a month, it’s my graduation present. We can go far away from here, somewhere they don’t know you!”

“You’re leaving?” Jerome whispers.

“You don’t have to be a killer, Jerome! It doesn’t have to be your responsibility to make people understand, or change, or whatever it is you think you need to do. You can just be a person, maybe even a happy person!”

“How long are you going for?”

Bruce pauses. “I’m not sure,” he says. “I have a bunch of teachers lined up—I thought I’d stay with each of them until I had a grasp of their trade.”

“And you want me to go with you?” Jerome laughs. “Happy tag-along sidekick, the miracle boy and his loyal slobbering pet!”

“That’s not what I mean,” Bruce says.

“Forget it! Even if I did like your hopeless little plan, I can’t go back now.”

Bruce holds him tighter. “You can always go back,” he says.

“You’re so—” Jerome laughs harder, his whole body wracked with it. “—stupid, you stupid, stupid little boy.”

Bruce scowls. But he doesn’t let go. Jerome thinks he’s naïve, but he isn’t; he’s seen some terrible things of his own, and he still believes in a future, and that doesn’t make him stupid. Why shouldn’t tomorrow be better than today?

“Do you think,” Jerome gasps, “if you pull a thorn out of my hand—I won’t be a monster anymore?”

Bruce doesn’t see the flash. There’s screaming cold pain, and then his body spasms, falling forward against Jerome. He has the terrible sensation of wetness where no wetness should be. There’s a clinking sound as the bottle hits the floor, and then Jerome catches him around the back, one hand cupping his head. His breath is so heavy in Bruce’s ear. It’s ragged. Wretched.

“The comedy is finished,” he murmurs, and lays Bruce bleeding across the carpet.

His shoes make a clinking clattering sound as he steps through the shards of blue glass and out into a hallway, where his henchpeople are more than eager to absorb him into the chaos. Bruce can’t think. He clutches his stomach and curls around himself, trying to keep pressure on the wound. It hurts to hold it, but it hurts not to touch it too, and for a long time pain is the only thing he knows. It is so heavy. It is so very heavy.

The last things he remembers are shoes, very close up, and the familiar sound of Alfred shouting.

 

 

 

Bruce is never sure whether Jerome intended to kill him. The wound was shallow, but that could have been just the shape of the break in the glass. The doors were all left open back stage, but that could have been carelessness. Some days, he thinks that Jerome meant to finally be rid of his ghosts after all those years. Some days he has other suspicions.

He recovers in a hospital upstate, far away from the dangers of Gotham. As soon as he’s well enough to fly, the trip resumes more or less as planned. The private investigator in England doesn’t require much rough and tumble exercise as part of his coursework. Bruce thinks of Jerome a lot, and then less, and then less. He is angry, and he is sad, and sometimes he catches himself missing their better moments, the quiet intimacy and the barbed jokes. He catches himself waiting for a net to fall. But there are other things to deal with.

Europe turns into Asia, and Asia turns into the pacific, and the pacific turns into Africa, and before Bruce knows it he has spent longer at large in the world than he would have spent in college back home. He thinks of Jerome from time to time. Undergoing a trial of endurance, an experiment in pain held in a desert somewhere, he remembers the stabbing. In a way he thinks he could be grateful to Jerome for the experience. Pain is a good teacher. He is learning to catalogue kinds of pain, to analyze them and discard them as necessary.

He is presumed dead. Alfred never corrects the newspapers that report his fatal stabbing, and Bruce appreciates the anonymity. It is harder to go places and accomplish things when you don’t have a family name over your shoulders. It’s a lesson in humility. He does his best to learn everything he can.

In the end, he gets caught at a border with an expired visa. One phone call to the right number, and Bruce Wayne the wunderkind is alive again, lost in a foreign country, just the kind of bizarre and melodramatic centerpiece that the city of Gotham devours eagerly. They'll be asking him what it was like to be Shanghaied for the rest of his life. 

  * And you know how it goes from there.



 

 

 

Bruce has been on the streets of Gotham for a few months before the word starts to go around. He starts small. He wants the uncertainty. He wants that paranoia. Criminals _should_ be looking over their shoulders, wondering if something is coming for them.

He’s monitoring radio signals on the roof of Star Labs when the alert comes over the police blotter. A stolen chemical transport vehicle at the edge of the narrows. He’s been following a string of similar crimes for the last few weeks, and he’s pretty sure they’re connected with the Red Hood gang—yet another incarnation, at least the fourth since he was a teenager. He tracks the source of the disturbance back to a processing center built on the remains of Indian Hill, an Ace Chemicals factory. He lights down in the smokestacks. From here, the city is a hazy green scattered with the alien lights of a thousand square windows. For a moment he feels like a kid again, alone in a city that doesn’t know him or care for him, and wants to eat him alive. But he’s older now. There are calluses on his hands.

He enters the factory through the maintenance window and moves silently down to the ground floor. This will be his first big intervention. Thus far he’s been mostly collecting anonymous tips, folios of information, etc, for law enforcement. It seems like after all these years he may still have an ally in Jim Gordon. He’s foiled a few low level crimes as well—plugged an exhaust pipe here, a snatched purse re-snatched, broken doors and stolen contraband. It’s not enough. Alfred is pushing him to be patient, but he’s itching out of his own skin at this rate. What difference do a couple cases of seized heroin mean in the grand drama of this city?

The mixing chamber echoes with tiny voices, myriad footsteps. Bruce disappears into the smoke easily enough. It’s a bit of stretch to call what the men below are wearing _hoods_. Mostly they’re gasmasks, the filters and frames painted a cherry camarro red. 

They seem to be gathering around the base of one vat in particular, so Bruce creeps along above them, following the center activity like a scientist watching an anthill from above. Through the vapor, ahead, he can just make out the figure of a human being among the railings. It’s a man. He is also watching the bustle below, his hands on the rail gloved and white, his own mask bulkier and more uncanny than the rest below him. He leans over the edge, shouting something to the mass. The vat under his feet is acid green and bubbling, thick with a sheen that Bruce can almost see reflections in. Each almost-shape blisters and is popped by another thick bubble.

The man on the rail, the red hood himself, pulls back his gas mask just enough to show his mouth. “I _said,”_ he shouts, “keep your hands off the merchandise! You don’t wanna know what sorts of fun things that goop will do to you!”

His lips are the same deadly red as those fast fast cars.

This is where Bruce makes his first mistake. This is big, he thinks, this is something that will make a difference. If he can knock this out now, take the head off the snake, the red hood gang will be out of commission for weeks, maybe more. Here, finally: a chance to do something that only he can do. So he makes a move.

He stands. “Red Hood,” he shouts, “you are under a citizen’s arrest!” He hasn’t had a chance to really get his introduction worked out. “Surrender without a fight and no one will get hurt.”

Red Hood swings around. He leans forward, trying to make out the figure shouting at him on a catwalk above a secret chemical weapon vat, and then rips off his mask in irritation. Bruce takes an unconscious step back, breath catching in his throat. Those red red lips are painted across the face of Jerome Valeska—a little sharper than he remembers, a little more frayed at the edges, certainly, but unmistakably Jerome. The familiar face twists in a furious scowl.

“Do you _mind?”_ he says. “I’m in the middle of something here.”

He hasn’t heard anything about Jerome since the less-than-fatal stabbing six years ago. Part of him thought—well a life of crime is usually short and ugly, or long and incarcerated, and with no arrest records to go on—

“And what _are_ you wearing?” Jerome asks, stalking across the catwalk with his hands in his pockets. “Did I miss October or something? Don’t tell me that’s a gas mask, it’s covering the wrong part of your face.”

He has wrinkles now. They aren’t obvious unless he’s scowling, like he is now, but they’re real and they make Bruce’s heart twist. He’s had an entire life after Bruce. His world did not stop turning with the murder of his only friend. 

“Is that Kevlar?” Jerome asks, his expression morphing into true interest now. “Hm, and I spy more than that. Did you come here deliberately to arrest me, citizen? Is that your _crime fighting outfit?”_

Is Bruce angry? He thinks he might be angry. That Jerome has an apparently successful gang, alive and well, after what he’s done—that his life just kept on going after Bruce was forcibly removed from it. But what was he expecting, repentance? Guilt? It’s a child’s anger, chewing at his stomach.

“Come quietly,” he says.

“Those are _ears_ , aren’t they!” Jerome says, delighted now. “What are you going to do, bat man, drink my blood?”

“I’m going to drag you out of here willing or not,” Bruce says. He slides into an earth stance, heels against the swaying frame. “This is your last warning.”

Jerome presses a finger to his cheek. “Uuhhhh,” he says, “how about no?”

The pistol glints red and green in the hellish light, his gloved fingers wickedly fast as he draws it from his pocket and fires. Bruce is already gone, launched from the railing and bearing down toward him, his cape streaming out behind him. The expression on Jerome’s face changes, his hands hang forgotten at his chest as he looks up, into the missile that is Bruce, all things slowing to a single point as—for the rapture of a second—Bruce can almost see himself reflected in Jerome’s eyes, and more than that, what he can become in the breathless moment between leap and landing.

The gun skitters across the rail and splashes into a vat. They go scraping and sliding down the catwalk as Jerome falls, his hands open, almost as if he is catching Bruce. They slam into a rail post.

“Oh,” Jerome says. He looks dazed, but despite the hard landing there’s a smile stretching his red red lips. “Well aren’t _you_ something.”

Bruce flips out his handcuffs. He has a tazer and a baton and a few other precautions, but Jerome seems pretty thoroughly subdued, and besides, Bruce is wary about heart conditions and other unhappy complications. Jerome eyes him, his coifed hair falling out of its gelled hold. “You’re new at this,” he says, “aren’t you?”

Bruce says nothing. He grabs one of Jerome’s wrists.

“I thought so,” Jerome says. His smile goes wicked, friendly, and disconcertingly familiar. “Let me give you a little on the job training.”

Quick as a snake, he’s grabbed the rail post and yanked himself out from underneath Bruce, over the side of the catwalk, and up around the other side of the railing. The wrist is still in Bruce’s hand—he’s pulled forward, off balance, a dead-man’s grip on Jerome with one hand and the other hand desperately clinging to the post behind him. He stares down into the bubbling vat. Green, green, green.

Jerome pauses there, balanced against the railing with his heels above the open air, and looks down at Bruce. For a moment, they are on that balcony again, curious strangers, enemies, an abnormality of gravitation suspending them before the inevitable fall.

“Say,” he remarks. “Do I know you? I never forget a face.”

“I won’t let go,” Bruce growls. “There’s nowhere to run. You’ll fall if you struggle.”

“Hmmm,” Jerome says. He swings back even further from the rail, giving the vat below an interested look. “So will you, now that you mention it.”

Pop. Sizzle. It’s true that they are caught in a tricky balancing act here. Below, the henchmen have started to notice what’s going on upstairs. Already a few of the quicker thinkers are running for the ladders at either end of the workroom floor. It’ll be a few moments before they can scale them and start to make their way to the center of the strata, but once they do it’ll be all over for this arrest. Bruce grits his teeth.

“Would you like to know what’s down there?” Jerome asks him, conversationally. “Not even these dumb thugs know what I know. It’s my own recipe, as a matter of fact. Wouldn’t you just love to know? Aren’t you curious?”

“I don’t have much interest in the speculation of an amateur chemist,” Bruce tells him, starting to strain under the tension of keeping his hold perfectly steady on a moving target.

“Ooh _hoo_ ,” Jerome crows. “A doubter! Maybe he’d like a firsthand demonstration!”

His fingers slide over the curve of the railing. It’s not a slip. It’s too deliberate—he’s letting go slowly, letting gravity draw him back into the pit that lies beneath. Boiling and deep, toxic and uncertain. It would take precious too many minutes to fish him out.

“Jerome!” Bruce snaps, “You’ll kill yourself!”

Jerome pauses. “ _I knew it_ ,” he says, “I knew I knew you!”

Bruce doesn’t swear, but he wants to. He can hear the distant myriad clangs of feet climbing metal ladders, a cacophonous count down.

“But who _are_ you?” Jerome muses. “I haven’t gone by that in years. _Jerome_ is a dead name buried in an old theater. Oh I suppose I did have my fifteen minutes of fame—but the public is fickle, and there’s always some new monster to titillate the weekly viewer. I’ve gotten so much more done now, without a face. Haha!” He slaps his hands against the rail in delight, barely maintaining his balance. “Without a face! _You_ get it, don’t you?”

The first ones are up the ladders now. It’s coming down to the seconds hand. He has to make a decision, and _now_.

“You, you, you,” Jerome says, more to himself now, “bat man. Man bat. Who dresses up in a costume to fight crime? Riddle me this, Riddler.”

“You’re coming with me,” Bruce says, “now.” And he lets go of the post, reaches up, reaches for the mask around Jerome’s neck, intent on dragging him back onto the catwalk come hell or high water. But he has to let go of the wrist to make this work. The moment he loosens his grip there—his fingers barely parted from flesh—Jerome lets go. He drops like a stone, a cruel smile on his wide lips and narrow eyes. Bruce’s heart gives a terrible thump. He reaches, snatching at air, trying to undo his mistake. Contact. Crunch. He catches the arm upraised in a jaunty wave, just barely, and the junked momentum of Jerome’s fall slams Bruce's cheek into the floor of the catwalk.

Jerome lets out a breath, a sound like a bubble popping. He stares up at Bruce. His eyes are wide now, genuine surprise creasing his forehead. He looks younger, paradoxically—for a moment Bruce’s overworked heart thumps from something other than fear, something sad and something still wanting. After all these years, it hits him for the first time how he misses the precious rare honesty they once had, how terribly he misses it. Seeing it again now, it dumbfounds him. All the thoughts of henchmen and criminal empires and betrayals fall away. He had been thinking that perhaps he never knew Jerome at all, but now, suddenly he wonders if he isn't the only one who _could._

“You caught me,” Jerome says.

“Hold still,” Bruce says. He doesn’t know how to fix this.

Jerome starts laughing. “All this,” he hiccups, “for a vigilante arrest?”

“I’m going to pull you up.”

 Jerome watches, laughter dying.  “Don’t bother,” he says. “I’ll fight you.”

“I won’t kill you,” Bruce says. “And I’m not letting you die.”

The light comes on in Jerome’s eyes. His face goes flat with wonder, a mirror reflecting back the deadly green of his own terrible creation. “Bruccccce,” he hisses. “Brucie Brucie Bruce, baby batty boy, is that you? Darling Brucie back from the dead?”

“Just—hold still.”

Jerome reaches up. He sets his hand around Bruce’s, as if he’s entirely forgotten where he hangs, a consoling pat against the straining fingers. “Back from the dead,” he says again, “you pretty monstrous thing you. I knew you could do it. I knew you would do it. You’re just like me, you always were.”

The floor behind them rings with footsteps bearing down. Jerome’s face switches off, like a light, and he shouts at someone just behind Bruce—“Shoot the disposal valve! Shoot it!”

The clanging falters—there is a deafening _crack_ —the control panel on the floor below erupts into smoke—and the titanic machinery below them begins to rumble into motion.

“Welcome back, darling,” Jerome says. “You’ll just love it the second time around.”

And then he wrenches back Bruce’s thumb until the whole grip snaps open, and he goes tumbling—in his suit and his useless gas mask, all his shark's teeth reflecting back the red darkness—into the boiling madness below. Bruce watches him disappear into its depths, his open hand out and useless above them as the surface closes back up into an almost perfect reflection of the ceiling above. The world stops. Behind him, the whole confused army of henchmen stops too, but it wouldn’t have mattered if they hadn’t. The world stops for Bruce either way.

There’s a huge thrum and crash, as the whole mixing floor empties itself into the river in a deluge of horror. Sirens scream in the red-tinted confusion. Hours later, the police will drag the river after the story has been told and retold again, but it will be too late. If there was anything to find, it’s long gone now. Bruce watches the water for a long time after that, and he hopes—as much as he dares to hope—that Jerome was right when he once said that some things refuse to stay buried. Criminal plots and betrayal and suicide and all, Bruce still has to hope. He doesn’t know how not to.

He has to believe this is a second chance, and not just a second act in their doomed _commedia_.

  * And you know how it goes from there.




End file.
